Slavery and African Oral Traditions in the Historical Novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana ...

338 Pages·2014·3.11 MB·English

Dramas of Memory: Slavery and African Oral Traditions in the Historical Novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella
and Ana Maria Gonçalves
By
John Thomas Maddox IV

Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Vanderbilt University

in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
Spanish and Portuguese

August, 2014

Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:
Earl E. Fitz, Ph.D.
Jane J. Landers, Ph.D.
William Luis, Ph.D.
Emanuelle K. Oliveira-Monte, Ph.D.
Benigno Trigo, Ph.D.
Copyright © by John Thomas Maddox IV
All Rights Reserved

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To Luciana Silva, who made Brazil part of me and came with me in search of more, to Dad, who told me I
would be the first Dr. Maddox, and to Mary Margaret, Joyce, and Regina Maddox, who cared for me in ways
only they knew how.

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Acknowledgements
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is a team. My professors and colleagues have all contributed to my
formation as a scholar, teacher, and professional, but I am especially grateful to Earl E. Fitz and William Luis.
They have pushed me to be my best since my arrival at Vanderbilt, and their support and mentorship have led to
many victories during my time here, including this dissertation. Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte, Benigno Trigo, and
Cathy Jrade have devoted much time and effort to improving my scholarship. The Center for Latin American
Studies, under Ted Fischer and Jane J. Landers, provided encouragement, camaraderie, and opportunities that
shaped my research. Paula Covington and Kathy Smith supported my work with the Manuel Zapata Olivella
Archives. The Joseph B. Johnson Black Cultural Center welcomed me into African Diaspora Studies. Ana
Maria Gonçalves and Isabel Allende were generous with their time and attention. The Robert Penn Warren
Center, because of the leadership of Edward Friedman and Mona Frederick, provided me with valuable
feedback from accomplished young scholars in diverse fields, generous support, and, most importantly, time to
work. All translations in the dissertation are mine unless otherwise noted.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………………………iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………….………………………………………………...…iv
Chapter
Introduction..............................................................................................................................................................1
I. Literary History: The Nuevo Muntu in Relation to the Literary Treatment of Slavery and
the post-Boom............................................................................................................................................18
II. Dramas of Memory for a Nuevo Muntu……………………..…………………………………….........100
III. Setting the Stage for the Nuevo Muntu: Zapata Olivella, Gonçalves, and Gilroy’s Black
Atlantic……………………………………………………………………..…………………………...136
IV. Writing Mother Africa………………………………………………………………………….............186
V. The Nuevo Muntu Today……………………………………………………………..…………...........243
VI. Conclusion. Open Gates…….…………………………………………………………………………..290
REFERENCES..……………………………………………………………………..…………………………300

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INTRODUCTION
For the first time, a predominantly black group of novelists from throughout the Americas is writing a
history of New World slavery that transcends national histories and uses oral and written sources of authority of
Western, African, and African-American origin. The focus of this dissertation will be two of its most
representative sagas: Afro-Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el gran putas (1983) and Afro-
Brazilian Ana Maria Gonçalves’s Um defeito de cor (2006). My definition of historical fiction as a
dramatization of history stems from these novels and it incorporates elements of oral and written discourses.
This combination allows syncretic traditions of the African Diaspora to be incorporated into written histories of
slavery. These authors use historical fiction to create individual and collective black diaspora identities that
redefine the tragic history of the nations of Africa and the New World. “Mother Africa” and maternity are
central to how these novels construct black history. These novels are prototypes of a subgenre of historical
fiction I call Nuevo Muntu (‘New World’ in Spanish and Bantu) historical novels, which revise the history of
slavery in the Americas and bear the impact of American and African racial politics of the 1960s. These texts
deserve a place in the literary canon, thus making a step toward specific periodization of “contemporary” Latin
American literature, now called “post-Boom” narrative by Hispanists, the dominant force in Latin American
literature in the United States (Shaw, A Companion, Antonio, “Allende’s”).
Before describing the dissertation’s chapters, I will define the four key terms I have borrowed and
modified to facilitate discussion of these works: “dramas of memory,” “guardiero,” “Nuevo Muntu,” and
“Mother Africa.” I give full credit to those who came before me, though this dissertation will help develop a
language with which to discuss New World history and literatures in a new way.
Incorporating the oral traditions of enslaved Africans into the literary canon means the meeting of oral
and written texts to recall slavery. The origins of Western literature lie in Classical Greece, where Aristotle and
the Sophists before him developed rhetoric with which to recall speeches. These were based on special cues that
were called a “theater of memory” (Ong 111). Today, literary scholars distinguish between the oral, corporeal
performance of theater and its written representation, drama. Eugene Vance uses “dramas of memory” to
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describe Medieval epic (400), as I develop in Chapter 2. The origins of literary theory and criticism in the West
begin with Aristotle’s debate with Plato over the function of literature (what they called “poetry,” and which
was almost all orally transmitted). Aristotle concluded that literature was closest to the ideals beyond the
appearances of the world (53). His favored form of literature (oral poetry) was the tragedy (53). This
performance’s plot structure, designed for the stage, has been taken up by historians from “the last tragedian”
Thucydides (20) to Hegel (White 122), and its structure is repeatedly found in historiography. If the novel of
today, unlike the poetic genres Aristotle defines, has no specific form (it is, in Latin America, an anti-genre that
emulates and often discredits “official” prose for González Echevarría [183]), if it is not the literary critic’s task
to establish true/false binaries but to study linguistic forms (thus disabling a separation between historical and
novelistic narrations), historical fiction, which can be called “dramas of memory,” must be a narrative mode,
structure, or form. This mode can be part of a work or all of it, though it is constant in historical fiction. The
historians and philosophers of history that historian Hayden White studies all create dramas of memory, as do
the authors of the Nuevo Muntu historical fictions, on which I will further elaborate. This mode of narrative has
been present in the New World since the relaciones of the Conquistadores and is present in virtually all novels
in the New World. However, what literary critic Seymour Menton calls “historical novels” and “New Historical
Novels” use this combination of oral and written discourses almost exclusively (15–17). These texts are the
written representation of oral performance. Like the epics and tragedies of old, they are centered around
transcendental acts of violence, as is the case of Hegel’s greater drama of history. Thus, combining oral African
myths with written Western myths reveals that the West has its own roots in oral myths, as the tragedians knew,
so literary critic Walter Ong’s binary of written (European) versus oral (African) cultures cannot be interpreted
as a Manichean division between two worlds without considerable common ground. Brazilian Anthropologists
have, since Nina Rodrigues, compared Sub-Saharan pantheons of Orishas, Loas, Vodouns, and other spirits to
the Greek gods, such as using the word “epopee” for their myths (115). If literary critics do the same, one must
question why some pagans have been, since the origins of literature, treated as purveyors of high culture, while
others have been consistently excluded from the tradition of the novel. These great gods and immortal heroes
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are treated as a pantheon, which modern-day tragedians like Zapata Olivella, Gonçalves, and the novelists that
come after them appropriate for their works. The notion of the canon, of high literature, is challenged by the
presence of the African spirits. By including these myths in their performances, these authors subvert the
Western canon, thus becoming an innovative part of it that changes the rest. These novels have new favorite
pagans and perform on a never-before-seen stage.
Like Cuban writer Miguel Barnet and 104-year-old former slave Esteban Montejo’s text, and the
nineteenth-century enslaved poet Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiography before the novels I study, there must
also be a perceived double to these novels, permitting a counter-narrative or supplement to previous notions of
history. Historical fiction is a double that points out and ameliorates the reader’s ignorance to its new version of
history. This is in the tradition of William Luis’s scholarship. His Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban
Narrative (1990) shows that abolitionist novels tell the history that history could not at the time they were
written. He views these texts as a counter-discourse that nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians
silenced and could not provide. This continues in the testimonio form in Barnet and Montejo’s work. Luis’s
work is the first to focus on the theme of slavery as the foundation of the literature of a given nation. My
dissertation focuses on trans-national works that incorporate both oral and written traditions. Nuevo Muntu
fictions incorporate the oral theatrical elements of human characters, plot, body, voice, movement, and
permeable divisions between the present and past, the living and the dead. The fluid boundaries of the sacred
and profane of African mythical time are combined with an awareness of the African Diaspora, the history of
slavery, and a desire to reconstruct elements of a past that, before these novels, were unknown to most. This
gate is opened by these guardieros’ voices. These authors and the difficult to represent slaves they invoke are
profane New-World embodiments of the spirit Elegua, the trickster who controls doorways. The reader must
deal with him before he can hear, or in the novel, read, the performance of the enslaved Ancestors. Elegua is a
creature of Africa, and these novels focus on a vision of the Americas that originates in slavery.
All theater requires a stage, which I express using the metaphor of the guardiero, the de facto guardian
of the plantation who determines the “space” on which history is reenacted by constructing an oral account of
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the past. Roberto González Echevarría, building on Luis’s work, uses this term to refer to Montejo, who
controls access to his memories of slavery, the spirits, and Cuban independence. In other words, guardieros, or
in the case of Zapata Olivella and Gonçalves, the guardieros of today, create geography, the stage of their
dramas. This is very important for politics, as legal scholar Carl Schmitt argued in his The Nomos of the Earth
(2003) (9). The Greek nomos could be translated as “convention” (Lebow 41), but its most literal translation is
“border,” because it comes from the word for “fence.” It is the basis for sovereignty, or the right to control an
area or thing. Recounting the history of slavery in fiction redraws the nomos of the Earth, because literary
history and its study often continue “national literature” projects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
which often excluded or minimized the contributions of black people. Montejo goes beyond the way his
nation’s history had been told before the Cuban Revolution, but he does not have the access to his own national
literature or that of other nations that Zapata Olivella and Gonçalves’s works exhibit. Montejo, whose
experience is confined to an oral world, can rewrite his nation’s history, but not that of others.
A Western and all-too-often Eurocentric formal education allowed Zapata Olivella to propose the Nuevo
Muntu, a trans-Atlantic political and cultural unity between the “three races” or “ethnicities” (African,
European, and Native American) that gives a new primacy to the African contributions to the New World. One
could say he is a guardiero working to dismantle the plantation, to alter its borders to the point that it is no
longer controllable or even recognizable to the master. Guardieros were notorious for aiding slave rebellions.
They altered the course of history from the margins to make greater liberty possible in the future, and Nuevo
Muntu Historical Fictions continue this project. “Nuevo Muntu” could be translated as “the new man,” evoking
Che Guevara’s revolutionary vision for Cuba in El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965). However, unlike
Guevara’s text, it unites the myths of Africa with the history and literature of the Europe and Americas. The
Muntu is Zapata Olivella’s interpretation of a complex Bantu-based ontology that does not separate past,
present, and future; man and nature; living and dead; even deities and humans (Changó, 730–31). The term
Nuevo Muntu is not used in Changó, but “Muntu” is; the author later wrote Tambores para despertar al Viejo
Muntu (n.d.), further exploring the oral history of the diaspora, so one could say that the Nuevo Muntu has not
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yet arrived, but that it lies in the hope of an awakening of the unity of the “three races” in harmony. This new
light in coming is a Nuevo Muntu that synthesizes the best of all humanity in the Americas (16). The Muntu, as
mapped in Changó, encompasses much of the Black Atlantic, but it focuses primarily on the late twentieth-
century Americas as the space from which slavery and the Orishas are remembered. The Orishas, while they
have analogues in other Sub-Saharan traditions, are of Yoruban origin, and the author’s combination of them
with this Bantu cosmology is an example of this text’s poetic syncretism. The Nuevo Muntu is different from
the pre-slavery Muntu because of influences such as slavery and religious syncretism, which often occurred in
the Americas as well as Africa. “Nuevo Muntu” is a more appropriate term than “Black Atlantic,” because
Changó el gran putas, the first novel to develop the concept, was begun around 1974 (¡Levántate! 334) and
completed in 1983, ten years before Gilroy popularized the term “Black Atlantic” and has important
differences, as Chapter 3 will discuss. It is part of a long-standing Luso-Hispanic tradition of “theory in the
text” in which literary authors develop narrative and political theory through meta-literary commentaries,
beginning with Don Quixote and continuing in the work of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Jorge Luis
Borges.
The Nuevo Muntu is an “imagined community.” Benedict Anderson, who coined the
latter term, has studied the novel’s vital role in creating national identities (Imagined Communities [1991]).
However, like inter-American Literature and the Black Atlantic, the Nuevo Muntu is not limited to the Nation-
State model of community. I do not mean to imply that Manuel Zapata Olivella had a direct influence on all of
the authors studied here. Ana Maria Gonçalves did not read Changó, el gran putas before writing Um defeito de
cor, though Nei Lopes’s novel Oiobomé: A epopeia de uma nação (2010) is clearly influenced by both of them,
as I show in Chapter 5. I hope critics and authors will continue to explore the concept of the Nuevo Muntu in
different contexts and using different approaches without falling into the trap of expecting authors whose works
have, until the 1970s and even more recently, been marginalized from the academy to have the same
development as, for example, Spain’s ebullient and prolific Generación del 27. The latter identified with some
interpretation of a Spanish national literature and had the infrastructure to access the texts of Góngora and other
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